Fenwick Smith to resign from BSO represented by RPR / CopyWriting & Creative Services For Immediate Release 54 Beach Street ™ Woburn, MA 01801 (781) 937-0389
[email protected] GBFA co-founder Fenwick Smith resigns from Boston Symphony Orchestra— Accomplished flutist to take more active role in GBFA Woburn, MA – Thursday, December 15, 2005 — Fenwick Smith, flute: Myra and Robert Kraft chair, endowed in perpetuity in 1981. Fenwick Smith took his first flute lessons in the public schools of Medford, Massachusetts. Largely self-taught until his senior year in high school, he was encouraged by Elinor Preble and Doriot Anthony Dwyer to apply to the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Joseph Mariano, graduating in 1972. Smith showed an early interest in things mechanical. By the age of sixteen he was working as a part-time milling machine operator for a small manufacturing firm. The following summer, Verne Q. Powell Flutes Inc., the leading American flute maker, offered him employment, which continued, mostly on a part-time, work-at-home basis, for the next twelve years. During this time he built about one hundred Powell flutes, including the instrument he has played during his entire professional career. After a summer at the Tanglewood Music Center, Smith moved to West Berlin, where he promptly became an active free-lancer, taught at Schiller College, and came under the salutary influence of James Galway. He lived in Germany for three years, with forays to Greece and to Paris, where he auditioned for the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs. In 1975, soon after Smith had made plans to return to Boston, the Ministry offered him the position of principal flute in the Regional Orchestra of Toulouse.